About the Han dynasty, sentence reading began to be used, but it was only a pause, not a punctuation mark. Generally speaking, the big pause of meaning completion is called "sentence", and the short pause of meaning unfinished is called "reading". In the Song Dynasty, circles began to be used. Use circles to indicate periods and dots to indicate commas. In the Ming dynasty, ︴ and ‖ appeared again, which were used to represent names and places respectively. These simple symbols can be regarded as traditional punctuation marks in China. But it is not perfect and has not been widely used for a long time.
In the 20th century, the use of modern vernacular Chinese became more and more widespread, and people urgently needed relatively complete new punctuation marks. Some scholars began to introduce some of the most popular punctuation marks in Europe and America into China, and based on ancient sentence reading symbols and referring to western methods, they developed the earliest new punctuation marks suitable for China characters.
After the founding of the People's Republic of China, the original punctuation was studied and sorted out. 195 1 In September, the Ministry of Publishing of the Central People's Government published Usage of Punctuation. * * * lists fourteen punctuation marks, including periods, commas, pauses, semicolons, quotation marks, colons, question marks, exclamation marks, brackets, dashes, ellipsis, proper nouns, titles and bullets.